This is a better successor to Coco Rosie's La Maison de Mon Reve than Noah's Ark, with similar gloomy smoke and theatrical mirrors allied to louder bursts of percussion and fuzzy, metallic guitar. As with La Maison a poignancy emerges from an imitation of the passage of time, like the sound of a woman singing as she mends clocks.
The shock of Nico's sampled voice gives an otherwordly edge to the first song "Journey," and from here the disc seems in thrall to the pace and temperature of her delivery. There are traces of the ghostliness of Alva, and (on the excellent "Snakes and Tea") of Virginia Astley's pastoral calm. Other developed pieces like "Disparu," "Four Hearts," and the graceful "Pale Dog" make the mere recording of waves as the total of "Ocean" seems worthless, although the notion of being outside is almost relief from a certain claustrophobia. Antony, (the increasingly ubiquitous) Devendra Banhart, Greg Rosgrove, and Jana Hunter join in to good effect, but Nico's 'appearance' trumps them all.
Lest we forget, La Maison de Mon Reve was a hideously seductive perfume of cartoonesque pre-war blues, twee-hop, and cold dollhouse opera. The sounds chimed and ticked in minimalist pop-folk delirium and the sisters spewed existential vomit, gloriously sweet as a childhood memory taken from someone else's photograph. Desert Doughnuts is neither as sexy, nor as sad, and may not have the shelf-life of that little gem, but it should fare better than the disposable Noah's Ark. Only one Casady sister, Sierra, is in Metallic Falcons, along with Matteah Baim.
I ignore whispers of ignorant racism and trust funds and am not at all concerned whether Metallic Falcons
or Coco Rosie are deemed 'real' or pretentious. Everyone who has nothing much to say hasn't the decency to invent their own gibberish language, like Liz Fraser. Yet, in a post-Philip K. Dick reality, what is authenticity?
I take the faint Eastern influences on Desert Doughnuts as sound, not cultural expression. The fake beards are fake, but they are, nonetheless, beards.
sounds:
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